Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

How LA Can Finally Solve Its Freeway Gridlock … and Become a World Leader

GELFAND’S WORLD-For
our biggest traffic frustration, the daily freeway commute, there is
now a potential solution. It's new, and it won't require increased taxes
or twenty years of construction. It's a bit like something out of
Disneyland and a bit of The Jetsons. The technology is being tested
right now in California, England, Poland, Korea, and Israel.
So what's this solution to our commuting woes?

It's a whole new generation of a
technology that has been in existence in various forms for half a
century. It has the unwieldy name Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), but it's
a whole lot more. It carries you in privacy and comfort along an
elevated guideway, without intermediate stops and starts.

Let's start by listing a few things we would want a new
transportation technology to have, and show how the new technology
satisfies them.

First, it has to be built without a tax increase, or any tax dollars for that matter.

Second, it has to be accomplished soon -- let's say 3 or 4 years.

Third, it has to give you a quick,
private, inexpensive ride all the way across town to downtown LA, or to
Westwood, or to LAX, or to the valley.

Fourth, it has to carry you in one
continuous ride, without lots of jarring, uncomfortable stops, the kind
of interruptions you have on a bus or a subway.

Fifth, it has to be built in a style that doesn't take up much ground space, or interfere with cars or with pedestrians.

Sixth, it has to be quiet, nonpolluting, and highly energy efficient.

When you are driving the freeway and you see red tail lights start to
fill the road in front of you, what do you feel? Remind yourself of
that feeling, and now consider the fact that we can actually do
something about it.

What is this techno-fix that can make your lives easier, if only we can develop the political will to get it done?

We know that the solution is not to build another set of freeways. It
would take too long, and cost too much, even if we were able to
double-deck what we have now. Likewise, we can't build new freeways
alongside the old ones in the LA basin, because there isn't the open
ground to construct them.

So there is nowhere to build except above the ground or down below
it. The down-below version is to build tunnels in which we run trains.
These are righteous projects which we should be supporting, but they
have a limited utility in terms of the overall problem, at least over
the next twenty or twenty-five years.

Light rail is also very expensive. By the time you do the planning
and the construction, you are looking at spending at least one-hundred
million dollars for every mile you complete. The other problem is that
the process, from start to finish, is measured in decades rather than
months or years. Because tunneling is such a lengthy, expensive process
(in excess of $450 million a mile), much of our new light rail will be
above ground, which complicates life for those who live along the route.
So what is this new idea we are talking about?

It's basically similar to the simple monorail or elevated gondola
idea, but updated using today’s more robust technology. Think of a
narrow elevated rail, or guideway, from which your passenger pod hangs,
and along which the pod moves at high speed. Another variant of this
idea involves building a narrow elevated track or roadway atop which a
passenger vehicle moves under the control of a centralized computer.

Now think about a small station near where you live, where a private
passenger pod comes to meet you. You click an icon on your cell phone,
telling the system your destination, and you are whisked away in comfort
and silence. The pod takes you directly to the stop where you want to
go. No stopping and starting at every intermediate station, because you
go right past them.

Physically, the system involves putting up poles about the size of
ordinary light poles. A rail is hung from pole to pole, and carries the
passenger pods.

Why haven't we seen this type of system sooner? Largely, the answer
is that it has taken a confluence of several technologies to make the
potential into reality. Modern computer systems and sensing devices mean
that pod movements are run by electronic controls that leave the
driving to the control system. This means that you don't have to hit the
accelerator and the brake. You can play on your computer, or listen to
music, or read a book, or just sightsee.

Current prognostications are that construction costs will be about
ten million dollars a mile, enormously cheaper than the hundreds of
millions of dollars that it costs to dig tunnels for full-scale subways
and ten times cheaper than putting rail above ground. That means that a
PRT system can be built using private investment capital rather than tax
funds. The cost of taking a ride on the PRT is going to be around the
same price you would pay to take the bus, and probably will be
considerably cheaper than what it currently costs you in gasoline.

This kind of system is also much quicker to build. A truck pulls up
to the site of a planned support pole, drills a hole in the ground, and
another truck comes along and pours some concrete into a mold. A few
days later, a third truck arrives and inserts the support pole. Do this
every couple of hundred feet along a road (more or less like you would
do for lighting poles), attach the guide rail, and you're done. Arrange
to have stations for getting on and off at convenient intervals.
Stations can even be situated in buildings. All you need is an entrance
and exit at the second or third story level, and there you have it.

Now think about getting on a passenger pod at LA International
Airport and riding without stopping, all the way to downtown LA, or to
the valley, or to Westwood.

Imagine creating a PRT system that will connect up Santa Monica with
West LA and downtown. Think about the city of Los Angeles being able to
move thirty or forty thousand people an hour using PRT lines. It's the
equivalent of adding two or three brand new freeways.

Imagine being able to carry ten thousand people an hour into and out
of LAX. It's the quicker, more intelligent version of park and ride.

Los Angeles has taken on a brave experiment in light rail
construction. We can't help but be pleased that this is finally taking
place. But there are limits to light rail. There are only so many routes
we can afford to build using this technology. In addition, the process
is going to take time. Figure another few billion dollars and another
ten or twenty years to get the whole system put up.

Besides its immediate goal of providing some respite to freeway
gridlock, PRT can also provide the remaining links in a comprehensive
system that will include rail, freeways, and public streets. It will
start by taking a huge load off of the freeways that serve the commuter
and which become such a nightmare during our rush hours. Our recent
experience is that the major freeways serving commuters -- the 405, the
10, the 101, and the 110 -- are becoming clogged at almost every waking
hour. Even weekends are finding these freeways jammed at inopportune
times.

Imagine that we build a PRT to serve the 405 corridor. The
engineering is straightforward, the cost is minimal, and the need is
painfully obvious.

This is why City Councilman Paul Koretz has been supportive of the
PRT concept. His constituents, like so many of the rest of us, have been
crying out for a solution to our transportation misery.
There is lots more to talk about, including the several companies
that are developing competing systems, any one of which might work in
Los Angeles.

The Skytran corporation, located
in California, has just signed a deal to build a demonstration PRT that
will be located in Tel Aviv, using an innovative system of magnetic
levitation and electric propulsion that promises to move people in near
silence, and at much reduced energy cost. Skytran will compete with
other American companies such as Jpods.Vectus is
applying Swedish technology to a PRT project in Suncheon Bay, South
Korea. Any or all of these companies may be competitive in the Los
Angeles market.

As mentioned in the desired specifications listed above, a PRT
system, correctly designed and engineered, can probably be installed
using private investment funding, rather than tax dollars. There is no
need to add to the sales tax in order to install PRT in Los Angeles.

The political landscape

A group of volunteers has been working on educating the public and
the transportation community. (Disclosure: I am part of that group, and
although I don't have any economic interest in PRT at this time, it is a
field I would love to become involved in. We are currently talking
about creating a nonprofit educational arm of our group in order to do
public education.) That volunteer group includes an engineer who
formerly worked on the design of the Space Station and interplanetary
probes. It also includes people who originally met each other through
the neighborhood council system. We hope to explain the idea of PRT to
additional community groups and neighborhood councils over the next few
months.

Here is the link to the PRT Task Force website.
If you look carefully, you will find that different companies are
taking different approaches. One is to run the PRT cars above an
elevated roadway. You can see that in the Vectus approach, for example.
The other way is to hang the pods from a narrow guide rail, as Skytran
is doing. This approach has an advantage in terms of taking up very
little space at street level, and can be installed pretty much anywhere,
including crowded city avenues.

The major lesson is that we can supplement commuter travel without building new freeways, and without breaking the bank.

There is lots more to be said. The most important, for you the
reader, is to visit the PRT website and, if you are somewhat convinced
that we should start to think about this approach, then we invite you to
sign the petition.

The Economic Impact of building a whole new export industry

One last word. Los Angeles was, at one time, the transportation
leader for the world. The Douglas DC3 was invented and built here. The
DC6 became the workhorse of civil aviation. The Space Shuttle was built
here, as were multiple generations of top line fighter aircraft.

We've lost a lot of that lead, but this is a chance to take it back.
Los Angeles, should it decide to invite the construction of a PRT system
here, will get manufacturing businesses and construction jobs. Along
the way, we will improve our air quality through the installation of an
all-electric system of commuter transport. There is a certain urgency in
getting started, because other countries would like to compete for the
business of building and exporting PRT.